Can't really find documentation on this. Manual configuration is fine. Since I just stream as a social hobby, I'm looking to minimise costs.
What's the least expensive way of ensuring security like hiding my IP? Will cheap object storage suffice?
For live streaming, object storage won’t do you much. That’s useful for VODs I guess but the live stream there ain’t much you can do.
You can use a cheap VPS as a proxy to your home server for the IP hiding aspect. Oracle’s free tier might do okay for that purpose, just make sure you keep local backups. Or just Cloudflare Tunnels. A VPS is nice though because you can upload once to the VPS, and it’ll redistribute to the viewers and will have much more bandwidth available.
But self hosting, especially video, generally ain’t cheap. That’s why the big guys like Twitch and YouTube are so invasive with ads and subscriptions that subsidize all the free users.
According to Owncast’s documentation, object storage services can be used to distribute live streams to viewers, even though it’s arguably an abuse of object storage for streaming.
The latency for that is probably horrible, but if that works for you use case, and the fees seems reasonable to you.
Object storage is usually cheap, but the API calls and bandwidth cost tends to add up, at least on AWS. At work we have Cloudflare in front anywah because the storage is cheap but continuously serving files from it gets expensive.